Built Technologies Acquires Nativ, Enhancing Its Products for Commercial Lenders

Built Technologies, a leading software provider for real estate lenders and the construction industry, recently announced that it has acquired Nativ, a leading deal management platform for commercial real estate lenders.

To introduce this collaboration to the commercial real estate industry, Riley Thomas, head of revenue at Built, spoke to Jeff Saul, co-CEO and co-founder of Nativ, in a video for Partner Insights to discuss how this would affect what the combined companies could offer.

Thomas emphasized that the two companies had “a similar vision for how the industry could change, and modernize all the problems it faced today.”

“We were pretty early into selling to large commercial shops for ground-up construction, and we hadn’t done anything where the loans had already stabilized and had a permanent financing vehicle on them,” said Thomas. “So many of our clients were clamoring for a solution that extended beyond construction.”

Thomas said that Built’s clients often discussed the challenges of siloed data, the “necessary but painful” use of the Excel, and how potential solutions focused on pre-origination, which “forced companies into a box.”

“What really was interesting with our conversations,” Thomas said to Saul, “is the ability for your platform to actually mitigate many of those risks and yet still get users to use it.”

Thomas mentioned that the Nativ acquisition will broaden the scope of services Built could make available for clients.

“Sometimes construction is only 5 percent of an overall asset lender’s portfolio,” Thomas said. “So having a broader kind of asset class coverage was really important to us.”

Thomas then asked Saul to summarize where Nativ’s current clients see the most value with a digital platform for deal management, and how the company differentiates itself.

“There are three primary ways lenders gain value from the platform,” said Saul. “One is automating their operations, which grants them significant efficiency and cost and time savings. Whether it be writing detailed reports or answering questions about their portfolio that might take hours of manual combing through data, now they can do it much more quickly and easily.”

The second way, Saul said, is to help the company’s clients make better investment decisions.

“By digitizing the process, we’re able to harvest data and leverage it for better insights into both individual transactions and portfolios,” said Saul

The third advantage, said Saul, is better risk management, or “eliminating a lot of that duplicative data entry [and the] error that comes with that, as well as unlocking insights that allow you to manage risks in your portfolio.”

Saul summed up why this deal is a winner for everyone involved by noting that “it all comes back to data.”

“Helping lenders and borrowers or owners collaborate more effectively in a common platform is a big milestone for us, and one that we’re going to be very focused on as we move forward,” said Saul. “If you don’t have your data in a centralized common digital workspace where you can collaborate, where you can start to automate processes like reporting and analytics and things like that, it just makes things much more difficult automating those operations and making better decisions. It was all about getting that data into one digital workspace. And I think Built and Nativ are rallying around that goal together in terms of how we think about the problems in the industry.”